[Fsf-friends] fsf must rate and talk about application softwares too

Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay sankarshan.mukhopadhyay@[EMAIL-PROTECTED]
Sat Jun 17 13:26:24 IST 2006


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Kush wrote:

> I can't say whether FSF should or should not rate the application
> development softwares or application softwares (i have no idea of the
> swot of fsfindia or knowledge beyond its mission statement) but somebody
> will have to do this job as it is very important to increase the spread
> of knowhow on whats good and whats available in open source. Open source
> software adoption can't really take off without proper knowledge in
> India and it seems that we at fsfindia are either developers or geeks or
> following agendas set by others outside India and our main focus is only
> on a few  areas such as localisation of fonts, scripts etc without
> understanding the economics and the problems of an average user we are
> now targeting.

One way of rating the software would be a self selection process whereby
the more the download and the usage the greater would be its ranking and
popularity. But is popularity a true indicator of usefulness. Apparently
similar software like MySQL and PostgreSQL have their own niche usage
patterns and there are die hard fans of each camp who would do anything
to prove 'my daddy strongest'. I would like to hear more about your
comprehension of 'agendas set by others' - the true nature of Free
Software development is working together in a collaborative community
where your work gets shared and used and modified by the greatest
possible number under appropriate licensing regime. That phrase you used
appears oxymoronic to me - could you explain ?

The very fact that there is work going on in L10n/i18n including
developing and releasing fonts and other toolkits does mean that the
developers are keenly aware of what it takes to get a working desktop to
the average user. When you mention 'economics and problems' what exactly
do you refer to ?

> We need to think of IT as an enabling tool but which is constrained by a
> few things in India's interior (the first is lack of reliable
> electricity, the 2nd is cost of the hardware/software and the most
> important is the knowledge and training on using the software with a
> lowered cost to benefit ratio).

True.

> We need more forums like epinions.com linuxquestions.org and reduction
> in the amount of duplicate knowledge available from so many sources.

If you look closely, the quantum of documentation being added to TLDP
nowadays is measly. This is a bit frightening in the context of the
number of new projects coming up on sf.net, berlios.de and sarovar.
Surely we are moving towards a situation where knowledge (or working
knowledge) of applications and perhaps architectures are limited to a
chosen elite.

> I for one, only came to know about other possible solutions for enabling
> libraries thru Frederick Noronha mentioning koha first and then in a
> subsequent mail open source softwares such as emilda.org, phpmylibrary,
> olibrary, elibrary etc.

Ohh...then I would ask you to hone your search skills :).
http://dmoz.org/Reference/Libraries/Library_and_Information_Science/Software/
throws up a lot of links and if you go to http://www.koha.org/, you
might just end up at www.l2c2.org who are doing some good deployment of
Koha based solutions (in fact doing work upstream)

> We sorely lack access to good libraries (and good books) as a  critical
> part of our  infrastructure to propel our HUGE population into the
> knowledge age  --the west has a huge collection of public and private
> libraries and other ways of interacting and gathering
> knowledge(community and recreation centres) but in India, public
> libraries are totally in the hands of unaccountable govt agencies and
> not under public minded private trusts etc, relatively speaking. Nobody
> compares/considers the impact of declining access to libraries on our
> ability to become a developed nation  --eg in the planning commission's
> budgeting process papers etc. Our intelligentsia looks upto the american
> consulate library or british council libraries for the latest and the
> best information and therefore we see good things happenning only in the
> west and merely copy them - -here i am talking about the general
> populations' access to libraries and not those who are in good private
> companies or renowned institutions like the IITs, IIMs, etc.

Aren't you putting in too many thoughts into one paragraph - I am a bit
puzzled as to where this is going. The work of getting works released
under the umbrella of entities like PLoS, BOAI is being taken up albeit
in small doses since moving the mammoth that is called the establishment
takes time.


> I was looking at the prime minister's office in Iceland's website and
> they said(in a pdf file) that ICELANd is at the forefront of technology
> adoption in the developed world, relatively speaking. What is most
> interesting is that tiny country has made use of some form of groupware
> application which is used *thruout *its govt machinery to give a uniform
> interface and this sort of thing is needed for duplication here in India
> to reduce size of organisations and make them competitive. But we do not
> build on other's mistakes/lessons to form a paperless office -- our
> vendors still hype about applications like openoffice (which is
> propreitary to sun/java )whereas we now need things like egroupware or
> jboss enabled open source document management systems which allow
> collaboration and monitoring so that our private enterprises can more
> easily network with each other. I don't think egovernance is possible in
> India at present given the lack of political will to re-engineer a
> bloated mega monster but surely our budding small businesses and small
> organisations/entrepreneurs can create a super world shattering effect
> if they could properly network and work as rapidly changing teams thru
> open source tools.

Have you looked at the intentions of NEGAP ?

:Sankarshan

- --

You see things; and you say 'Why?';
But I dream things that never were;
and I say 'Why not?' - George Bernard Shaw
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